Back last year I stumbled across the book Cork Boat, the tale of a crazy American who built a boat out of wine corks and sailed it down the Douro River in Portugal.

It only serves to reason that when I stumbled across an offer of a “renovated fisherman’s cottage” in Porto (where the Douro enters the ocean) on craigslist.com, we carved out part of our spring trip to take us to Portugal for two weeks.

So from May 13 to 26, before flying up to Copenhagen, we’ll be living just north of Porto in Leca da Palmeira.

When I later found out that airport code for Porto’s airport is OPO, my faith in our decision was only reinforced.

Perhaps you were thinking, after reading of my jackhammer plight, “I wonder what that actually sounds like.”

Attached hereto for your listening pleasure are 40 seconds of sound recorded with the internal microphone on my iMac after the jackhammers started up after lunch today. Suggestion for stress test: blast this through your headphones in an endless loop, and try to complete a complex technical task.

My office window here at [[84 Fitzroy Street]] in [[Charlottetown]] faces right out onto the Queen Parkade, a multi-level parking garage. If you leave out the “large concrete monolith that blocks out the sun” part of the deal, they’ve been a good neighbour.

Until today.

Today CADC, the crown corporation that runs the parkade, started work on a renovating the first two levels of the Queen Parkade, work that is expected to continue until the end of May.

“Work” in this case means “jackhammers that sound and feel like they are operating inside my head.” In other words, my office space has been rendered uninhabitable.

The jackhammer operators are on a lunch break right now and peace has momentarily returned to the kingdom. If the sound and fury keeps up as it did this morning, however, I’m going to have to move out of the office.

Results of the Provincial By-election in District #2 are available at results.electionspei.ca. You’ll also find links to raw data files and an RSS feeds of the poll-by-poll results there.

Somehow in the week that I was away, [[Oliver]] became a completely accomplished user of Firefox. While he’s not installing his own extensions yet, he can start it up, find PBSkids, and independently browse around for hours. This is all due, I think, to his reaching a sweet spot of hand-eye coordination (so as to run the mouse effectively), a sudden surge in digital curiousity, and a desire to be in the driver’s seat.

As I type this, it’s Sunday afternoon and Oliver is sitting over in [[Johnny]]’s office with my [[laptop]]. I haven’t heard a peep out of him in 30 minutes, although I hear Barney singing and Teletubbies gurgling from time to time.

What’s most amazing about this is that only a couple of weeks ago Oliver simply couldn’t do this: three weeks ago I left him alone in front of [[Catherine]]’s iMac for 5 minutes and I came back only to find that he had mistakenly ended up at the website of the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Of course there’s always a chance that his choice was deliberate and that I mistakenly redirected him to Barney when he was in the midst of an evaluation of the DRM situation in Latvia.

When I arrived here at Bradley International Airport north of Hartford, CT last Sunday I was out of the terminal and on to the Hertz bus in just a few minutes, so I only got the vaguest sense of the state of the terminal. Now that I have (characteristically) arrived 90 minutes early for my flight, I’ve had a chance to understand just how 1972 it is.

I hasten to add that I speak here only of the ye olde terminal that is now home to Air Canada and a gaggle of discount airlines like Southwest, and some others that you’ve either never heard of, or that have gone out of business. It is not, in other words, the focus of the Bradley’s future.

It is, however, a remarkable time capsule of the architecture of my youth, and a visit here helps one understand why airports created in reaction to this era are full of light and open space.

It reminds me of a near-empty mall on the suburban strip in Denver that [[Mike]] and visited a couple of years ago, a relic of the big mall construction build of the 1970s that had fallen victim to the new and modern mall across the road.

When I asked the gate agent at [[Air Canada]] where I should hang out, he sent me here to the Sheraton Hotel, which appears to serve as the de facto lounge for the terminal — the lobby has a “We Proudly Serve Starbucks” coffee shop, and wifi is available for $4.95/hour (there are about a dozen others here, sucking power from behind plant stands, with laptops open).

It’s a beautiful day, and it should be still be daylight when we take off at 5:40 so I should get a good view of New England from the air.

I’m stopped here in Keene, NH for lunch at the Panera Bread outlet. They have free wifi, and a very friendly start page:

At Panera Bread, our WiFi is free and we welcome you to stay as long as you like. All we ask is that you give consideration to other patrons, particularly at busy times of day.

At lunchtime, for example, please try to use the smallest table available so that we can accommodate larger parties. Or, come back when things have slowed down and you can spread out your work.

Thank you for your patronage and consideration. With your help, we can all enjoy our sandwiches, salads, freshly baked bread and hot coffee — and free WiFi, too.

The is not only considerably more friendly than a “please limit wifi use to 10 minutes” rule, but also, I suspect, engenders a fierce loyalty to the brand. It’s smart friendly, in other words.

We’re firming up our spring travel plans and we’re looking for temporary housing in Copenhagen, Denmark from May 26th to June 11th, 2006. We’re looking for a child-friendly apartment, flat or house, centrally located and/or within easy walking distance of public transit. We’ve found a place!

Just how many “separated twins change places” movies can Disney make? There’s the original 1961 The Parent Trap and the 1998 remake starring Lindsay Lohan. And tonight here in my hotel room on The Disney Channel, Model Behaviour, a movie that seems to have essentially the same plot and stars Kathy Lee Gifford and Justin Timberlake.

The Disney Channel, by the way, is a brilliant example of well-integrated vertical evil. The channel is all Disney, all the time.

Before I got sucked into the twin movie, I saw Transamerica at the Peterborough Community Theatre. It was an excellent movie, and Felicity Huffman and Kevin Zegers were both brilliant.

It’s into the Prius and down to Hartford again tomorrow afternoon for the flight home to [[PEI]] via [[Montreal]]. It has been a good week at [[Yankee]] this week, but I’ve been away from home too long and it will be good to be back.

Having no meetings this afternoon, I left [[Yankee]] a little early and headed into Nashua, NH for some eating and shopping and movie-going.

My wonderful Born shoes have been gradually falling apart this winter, and over the last week they’ve started to leak, so my immediate priority was to find shoes (I tried to feel Proud in my Shoes From Proude’s last week, but they’re all outta Borns and seemed generally disinterested in my business).

I stopped at the L.L. Bean outlet, but they had nothing but preppy beach shoes and hunting boots. Down in the heart of the mall district I found a plaza full of shoe stores along with an Eastern Mountain Sports. While the shoe stores were full of heavy Vans and shiny dress shoes, at EMS I found a couple of perky, vital sales people willing to spend a lot of time with me selling the virtues of the Keen Bronx Canvas shoe. I spent about 30 minutes vacillating between the size 11-1/2 and the size 12, and finally settled on a nice greeny-brown (offically Oak Mold/Green) pair. The buying experience was so pleasant I halfway considered buy a kayak or yurt at the same time.

I’d decided before setting off to try to visit the Wilton Town Hall Theatre to see Woody Allen’s Match Point. Readers with good memories will recall, however, that I’d already seen this movie, in Geneva in February, something I’d completely forgotten; by the time I realized the error of my memory it was too late, and I was left without movie options.

Undeterred, I stopped in at Chiang Mai, the excellent Thai restaurant on Rte. 101 on the outskirts of Nashua. I ordered up the Gai Kapow (spicy chili-basil infused chicken) and some rice along with a “Thai iced tea” and left the table very satisfied.

The drive down to Nashua and back gave me the opportunity to experience podcasts like Big City People do: in the car. I listened to an episode of Daily Source Code on the way down and on the way back half an episode of TWIT and a good episode of the Lonely Planet Travelcast on Las Vegas.

I’m getting used to driving the Toyota Prius and it’s become really quite comfortable to drive now that I’m used to the gasoline engine shutting off at intersections and at other times when it’s got nothing to do. Mileage on the way to Nashua, which is mostly downhill, was 50 miles per gallon; on the way back up the hill to Peterborough it was a still-impressive 42.2 MPG.